Major League Baseball kicks off its 2011 season today, with seven games on the calendar, including the 2010 World Series champion San Francisco Giants traveling to Los Angeles to take on the Dodgers, while the runner-up Texas Rangers have to wait until tomorrow, when they open up at home against the Boston Red Sox. While many of us are preparing to settle in for the 162-game season and cheer our favorite teams (Go Cubs!), our thoughts and prayers still turn thousands of miles away toward Japan, where the start of the Japanese baseball season has been pushed back several weeks, to April 12, because of the devastating earthquake and tsunami of March 11.

It also gives us a chance to explore the question: Is baseball still America’s game, and was it ever? (Fans of professional football might have a dog in this fight.)

Baseball has usually been described as America’s national pastime, and as Britannica’s article on baseball even declares, “the game has long been woven into the fabric of American life and identity.” Indeed, the poet Walt Whitman took ownership of the game for the Yanks (errr…Americans), exclaiming “it’s our game” and explaining that baseball “has the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere—it belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life. It is the place where memory gathers.”

So powerful was the idea of baseball as an American sport that the origin myth that baseball was “invented” in Cooperstown, New York, by Abner Doubleday in 1839 perpetuated for decades, though it later became clear that baseball most likely descended from the English game of rounders. No matter the origins of baseball and the fact that we still call our Fall Classic the World Series, baseball is a sport of global popularity. Still, the world’s best players see America’s Major League Baseball as the pinnacle of the game and come to “the States” to ply their trade (and cash in on the millions on offer for the best players).

(For the 2011 season, there are 11 Japanese players in Major League Baseball, according to USA Today, including such stars as Ichiro Suzuki (Mariners), Daisuke Matsuzaka (Red Sox), Hiroki Kuroda (Dodgers), Hideki Matsui (A’s), and Kosuke Fukudome (Cubs), and they—and numerous other athletes from around the world of sport—have been donating some of their salaries to relief in Japan.)

While aging American players (and even managers) and those who can’t break into American clubs as starters often head to Japan to make a few yen and end their careers (or try to jump-start it), in international competitions, teams from outside the United States have often dominated. (I would suspect that Americans would recognize only a few names of players who have played in Japan, such as Warren Cromartie, Larry Doby, Don Newcombe, Joe Pepitone, and Rich Gossage, and manager Bobby Valentine.)

In the two World Baseball Classics, held in 2006 and 2009, have ended with Japan on top, with Cuba and South Korea the runners-up, respectively. In the Olympics, Cuban squads have dominated, winning gold in 1992, 1996, and 2004, while South Korea captured gold in 2008 and the United States in 2000. At the younger age levels, teams from outside the United States regularly win the Little League World Series (Chinese Taipei has produced 17 champs, while Japanese teams have won 7, Mexico 3, South Korea 2, Venezuela 2, and Curacao 1). In the 2000s, however, American squads have fared pretty well at the LLWS, winning 6 championships to only 5 for the international squads.